My portfolio

I have devoted my professional life to the systemic challenges of the 21st century. To address those, I lead and support a broad range of initiatives, mainly during their early phase of development. My core skills lie in clarifying complex and original ideas, capturing those in simple written form, and aligning a group of supporters around a shared sense of belonging, across cultures, perspectives and languages.

Projects I lead and support target three core challenges: improving governance and global cooperation, training discernment in ambiguous and uncertain settings, and building resilient and hospitable communities.  The rest of this page gives more details about my portfolio.

If you would like to discuss one of those projects, or you are leading a new initiative where you believe my skills and experience could be of use, please, contact me! 

At the global Level, I lead and support projects to upgrade governance systems and improve global cooperation.

We live in a period of rapid transition between economic, technological, and geopolitical systems. We face the risk of civilization collapse. We have a chance to create unprecedented abundance. What our world ends up looking like will depend on our capacity to shift global power structures, hard and soft – institutions, protocols, and narratives.

In 2016, I joined the Global Challenges Foundation as Editor-in-Chief. In this role, I orchestrated a global conversation on global catastrophic risk and new governance models to reduce those risks. This work served as a frame for the world’s largest prize competition in the social sciences, with $5 million in prize money to reward proposals on how to upgrade our current global governance systems. After the competition, in 2018, I joined the GCF’s outgoing executive director, Corin Ism, to cofound the Future of Governance Agency (FOGA), an organization that aims to bring governance innovation and power literacy to the public and its institution. Our book How to Rule a World offers an introduction to existing and emerging tools for power and governance, and is due for publication in 2023/24.  

Complementing my work with FOGA, in 2020, I became an advisor to Isgood.ai, an AI-powered platform to step-change the way we measure social outcomes and impact. In 2021, I became advisor to Future Value, helping founder Selar Henderson articulate a trust building framework to support their regenerative finance work in Papua New Guinea. Finally, I joined the advisory board of the Global Carbon Reward, a revolutionary climate initiative that proposes a new central-bank backed transnational currency to fund global decarbonisation. The Global Carbon Reward features prominently in Kim Stanley Robinson’s optimistic sci-fi book Ministry for the Future, and more generally aligns with the SolarPunk movement. I wrote with Corin Ism on this new narrative and aesthetic trend that imagines a future of solar-powered abundance, for Singularity University and the Dhaka Tribune. This work on solar punk inspired another book with Corin Ism, Liberation Tech - the untapped potential to reclaim technology for freedom - scheduled for completion in early 2024.

After migrating to Australia from France in 2008, via a three-month overland journey Paris to Singapore, I developed a keen interest in Asia as the world’s new centre of gravity. That year, prompted by the Beijing Olympics, I started learning Chinese. In 2011, this led me to found a charity organization called Marco Polo Project, whose first initiative was to develop a digital magazine bringing the voices of Chinese intellectuals to western readers through collaborative translation. This gave me an opportunity to explore the Chinese blogosphere at its peak, and contribute to global publications on digital China, including the China Story and Danwei. I also explored Chinese innovation communities, while leading a project to build a China-Australia social enterprise incubator. This later merged with the China Australia Millennial Project (CAMP), the world’s largest China-focused bilateral incubator, which I joined as parachute COO in the lead to its first 2015 Sydney forum.

My PhD dissertation, Chinese language learning: towards a digital ecosystem? is located at the intersection of global governance, digital innovation, and engagement with China. Based on my experience building Marco Polo Project, and interactions with the founders of apps, websites and platforms supporting autonomous language learning, the thesis maps an emerging ‘ecosystem’ of learning tools as a distributed global public good in the making. After finishing my thesis in 2020, I am now sensing the opportunity to develop an incubator for global public goods, and more generally support and articulate new business, funding and mental models for public education, civic tech and open source everything.

At the individual level, I lead and support projects to train discernment in uncertain and ambivalent settings.

We live in a time of civilizational transition. As individuals, this means we must navigate highly ambivalent and uncertain environments, both in our personal and professional lives. This puts a heavy burden on our decision-making capacity. In a world that is changing so fast, what criteria should one take into consideration to make the right decisions?

When the context is stable and the rules are clear, setting goals and figuring out the best pathway towards that goal is a difficult enough task. When rules and systems are dissolving, proper discernment is orders of magnitude harder to achieve, yet all the more critical.

Helping individuals develop better discernment to face the challenges of the 21st century is at the core of my practice as a coach and educator. This work is anchored in my own training in leadership and human-centred design, extensive reading in philosophy, regular practice of Qi Gong and meditation, and Ignatian Spiritual Exercises. My activities in this area take three main forms.

First, I support founders and visionaries in their attempt to create new paradigm-shifting ventures. I help them capture their vision in white papers, op-eds, pitch decks and other documents, and I help them align their people on the vision, or more generally coach and advise them on potential directions and pitfalls. Projects I have supported, beyond the ones listed elsewhere in this portfolio, include the Fab9 Maker Space, sharing economy app Counta, social investment company Future Value, cybersecurity start-up Spritecloud, financial market analysis platform Neveus, second-hand marketplace and fundraising platform Charity Bay, and organizational design practice Kikyu.  

Second, I contribute to educational ventures that focus on entrepreneurship, psychological balance and emotional intelligence. In 2018, I worked with Insight Academy of Innovation and Entrepreneurship to embed design thinking into their business curriculum. I later assisted their lead coach Samantha Sacchi Mucchi with the Self-Club, a community devoted to developing self-awareness, nurturing emotional intelligence and raising social consciousness. I contribute advice and workshops to School of Future, an Indian based edtech venture future-proofing high-school students by training them in entrepreneurship, initiative and collaboration. I also support psychologist Christine Yeung on Beyond Story, a venture developing training programs and AI-enabled systems to optimize psychological fitness, as a way to fight the loneliness epidemic and improve belonging and connection.

Finally, I develop independent scalable programs to train discernment and decision-making. In 2020, I piloted an original coaching program called Landscape your life, for people living and working across systems who must negotiate complex professional or personal transitions, and are looking to realign their past, present and future. In 2021, with Kikyu founder Patrick Laudon, I co-created the School of Decision Making a digital program offering a systematic framework to design and implement better collective decision making models in organizational contexts. On the horizon, I am looking to use this project as a first step to developing a new civics curriculum, allowing school students to learn about power and decision-making from first principles. 

At the local level, I lead and support projects to build more resilient, hospitable and fertile communities.

The 21st century is a period of fast change and movement. People are migrating en masse, and will continue to do so, with up to a billion climate refugees expected by 2050. Meanwhile, environmental pressures and technological evolution (especially the rise of AI), herald a period when professional lives will be anything but predictable. As people face a constant shift in their identities and solidarity networks, under the joint impact of migration and industrial disruptions, we need collective structures that can act as shock absorbers. In companies, neighbourhoods, learning institutions, or informal ‘communities’ of all sorts, we need the right mindsets and methods to continuously renegotiate what is to be considered common world, common knowledge, common language, common sense, and common morality.

In 2015, I pivoted Marco Polo Project to focus on the systematic development of facilitation models that promote social health in diverse environments. Over the years, we developed a range of facilitation micro-structures for linguistically diverse groups, captured in the Marco Polo Handbook. Our program Design for Diversity uses human-centred design principles to train creative problem solving among culturally diverse teams. Translation Club uses collaborative translation to trigger deep personal insights and nurture intercultural empathy, and now regularly engages English, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, Romanian, and Nepali speakers in Melbourne and around the world. During the COVID pandemic, we turned to digital formats. I piloted a multilingual digital storytelling model under the name Default Settings, co-created digital mourning rituals, and ran a workshop on intercultural empathy as a preamble to the inaugural 2020 Future Law Virtual Summit. From July 2021, with support from the City of Melbourne, Marco Polo Project will be leading a 2-year project to help migrants embrace hybrid identities and accelerate civic engagement.  

As a European polyglot, I am particularly attuned to role of language in shaping identities and belonging. This fascination with language as humanity’s greatest social and intellectual tool has led me to an early career in linguistics at Paris Sorbonne University. I have since tutored and lectured on languages and translation at universities in France, China, Japan and Australia, and supported digital language learning tools as advisor and beta tester, including Hacking Chinese, Italki, FluentU. As a language educator, my main interest lies in language education as a school of emotional and intellectual self-awareness – and exploring ways of training the non-linguistic aspects of language education, as a way to prompt greater social, emotional and cognitive flexibility.

 Beyond language, I am very attuned to the role played by narratives in defining norms and values, and more generally defining what we consider to be possible and desirable worlds. This drives my personal writing practice, conducted on my blog, in which I share regular moral reflections. In particular, I have devoted various series to inherited virtue frameworks, including the Seven Deadly Sins, the Four Cardinal Virtues, Confucian Virtues and Buddhist Virtues – as inherited models to guide personal and collective aspirations. Those reflections inspired a piece called Who Should Die and what should we do with the bodies, for Meanjin Autumn 2023.

My work in storytelling is closely tied to my involvement in the LGBTIQ community. In 2005, I coordinated and co-wrote Regardez moi dans les yeux, the first French language short story collection offering positive models for LGBTIQ teenagers, and proceeded to write and publish Mehmet et Philippe ou les surprises de l’amour, a gay young adult rom-com. In Australia, I wrote and directed Honeypot, an award-winning short-film which received 4.5 million views on Youtube, and organised the mixed-media exhibition Love Journeys, stories of LGBTIQ migration to Australia. I am now working on the draft of Faultlines, a novel that weaves climate change activism and romantic comedy.  

My understanding of storytelling as an act of peace-making is deeply inspired by the work of Samuel Diaz and the School of Slow Media. I joined their inaugural 2015 program in Phnom Penh as a founding participant, co-facilitated their 2017 Manilla program, and joined the advisory team for their 2020 digital listening gym.

More fundamentally, my commitment to clear language stems from awareness of the challenges we face, and the risk of not rising to the occasion. I work with founders and visionaries to create expressions of their ideas that are maximally context-independent, in order to increase the likelihood of their ventures succeeding and scaling. I work with educators and communities to reduce misunderstandings and ensuing frictions in linguistically and culturally ambiguous environments, trans-disciplinary or complex settings. All this is an attempt at overcoming prisoner’s dilemmas, and reduce the risk of critically needed initiatives failing through preventable misunderstandings.

Below is a more detailed breakdown of my portfolio, by project. If you would like to discuss any of those further, or are working on a new initiative where you believe I might contribute positively, please, contact me! 

Major collaborative projects (current)

Writing, research, and emerging projects

Previous large-scale projects and collaborations

Previous experiments, artistic projects and learning resources